Ronald Reagan: Hawk or Dove?

In a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, journalist Peter Beinart reassesses the legacy of Ronald Reagan by first restating the most common assumption about our 40th president, that “Ronald Reagan was the Ultimate Hawk.” Is this true? “Not so much,” writes Beinart:

“Today’s conservatives have conjured a mythic Reagan who never compromised with America’s enemies and never shrank from a fight. But the real Reagan did both those things, often. In fact, they were a big part of his success… Sure, Reagan spent boatloads — some $2.8 trillion all told — on the military. And yes, he funneled money and guns to anti-communist rebels like the Nicaraguan Contras and Afghan mujahideen, while lecturing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall. But on the ultimate test of hawkdom — the willingness to send U.S. troops into harm’s way — Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war — the 1986 bombing of Libya — was even briefer. Compare that with George H.W. Bush, who launched two midsized ground operations, in Panama (1989) and Somalia (1992), and one large war in the Persian Gulf (1991). Or with Bill Clinton, who launched three air campaigns — in Bosnia (1995), Iraq (1998), and Kosovo (1999) — each of which dwarfed Reagan’s Libya bombing in duration and intensity. Do I even need to mention George W. Bush?”

Reagan’s comparably humble foreign policy is worth noting, precisely because so many of his neoconservative admirers today insist that Dubya’s wars, or even Obama’s insanity in Afghanistan, somehow reflect a “what would Reagan do?” philosophy. Yet, the opposite is more true and given his record, it is hard to imagine Reagan launching, or enduring, wars as foolish and long as what the U.S. currently finds itself bogged down in. Reagan had an aversion to prolonged military conflict, something either forgotten or intentionally ignored by his pro-war champions today. Writes Beinart:

“As early as 1982, after Reagan skirmished with Israel (and) declined to send U.S. troops to Central America… Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were ‘sinking into a state of near political despair.’ New York Times columnist William Safire announced that ‘if Ronald Reagan fails to awake to the hard-liners’ anger at his betrayal, he will discover that he has lost his bedrock constituency.’ By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that ‘in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained’ than his right-wing supporters had hoped.”

But how about Reagan’s supposed crown achievement, in helping to win the Cold War? According to the neocons in his day, who apparently have short memories these days, Reagan got that wrong too. Writes Beinart:

“(N)othing compared with the howls of outrage that accompanied Reagan’s dovish turn toward the Soviet Union. In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow’s imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having ‘shamed himself and the country’ in his ‘craven eagerness’ to give away the nuclear store… When Reagan signed the INF Treaty, most Republicans vying to succeed him came out in opposition. Grassroots conservative leaders established the Anti-Appeasement Alliance to oppose ratification and ran newspaper advertisements comparing Gorbachev to Hitler and Reagan to Neville Chamberlain.”

In December of last year, a Public Policy Poll ranked Ronald Reagan as the most popular modern president and he certainly remains popular in the GOP, where everyone from John McCain to Sarah Palin claims to be a “Reagan Republican.” Considering this continuing popularity, it is well worth pointing out that Reagan as the “ultimate hawk” is largely a myth—at least compared to how most of the Republicans today who speak in his name view American foreign policy. Columnist George Will asks us to consider the American Conservative Union’s David Keene’s take on Reagan’s relatively tame foreign policy:

“He resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office. . . . After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets. Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?”

The answer? No. Neoconservatives will almost always commit troops anytime, anywhere and for any reason, whereas Reagan was hesitant most of the time, wary of where he might commit and liked having a good reason. If Reagan’s actual foreign policy record could become mainstream again, it would be a trend toward something far saner than what both parties subscribe to today. And if mainstream conservatives still suckered by the prevailing pro-war, any-war rhetoric on the Right are the least bit serious about honoring the memory of Ronald Reagan—they could start by no longer pretending that he was something he was not.

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6 Responses to Ronald Reagan: Hawk or Dove?

Reagan was not a fiscal conservative, not a national security “conservative”, and not a social conservative.

Privatization, globalization, deregulation and demutualization have turned out, in the most spectacular fashion, to be anything but fiscally responsible. The same is true of a generation of scorn for full employment, leading to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s and to the institutionalization of that mass indolence down to the present day.

The transfer of huge sums of taxpayer money to ostensibly private, but entirely risk-free, companies in order to run public services: is that fiscally responsible? Bailing out Wall Street at all, never mind so that it can carry on paying the same salaries and bonuses as before: is that fiscally responsible? Even leaving aside more rarefied academic pursuits, is it fiscally responsible to allow primary education, or healthcare, or public transport, or social housing to fall apart? Is that good for business?

Will it be fiscally responsible to allow the private health insurance companies to charge the American taxpayer whatever they like, because the absence of a public option or a single-payer system was the price of the votes of Blue Dogs who still voted against the Bill anyway and of wavering Republicans who turned out not to exist at all? It is no wonder that Jerry Brown turns out to have been far more of a fiscal conservative, as that term is generally employed, than Ronald Reagan. Even to a fault on occasion.

But what of the other two legs of the stool that was the Reagan Coalition? The only two conservatives things that Reagan ever did were to begin nuclear arms reduction in Europe and to withdraw from Lebanon because no American interest was at stake; Obama is the worthy heir of the first, but would that he were of the second. Reagan was no more a national security conservative, as that term in generally employed, than he was a fiscal conservative, as that term is generally employed, both uses being wholly erroneous and such as to render meaningless any concept of conservatism.

Bringing us to the third leg, the social conservatives, “the Religious Right”. The moral, social and cultural consequences of massively increased welfare dependency and the glorification of selfish greed were wholly of a piece with the rise of Political Correctness in the 1980s, and with that decade’s general moral chaos. Reagan was an extremely infrequent churchgoer and did not formally belong to any parish, congregation or denomination. He remains the only President of the United States ever to have been divorced. He signed the California no-fault divorce bill in 1969 that became the model for the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act promulgated in 1973 and widely adopted in most states. And, as Governor of California, he signed into law the legalization of abortion in that state. Read that last sentence over again.

Ronald Reagan as the apotheosis of modern conservativism is one of the most asinine and flawed ideas I’ve ever heard. It exposes the individual peddling such nonsense as “I’m a Reagan Conservative” (think Sean Hannity here) as an intellectually frivolous man. Ask yourself, if Reagan was so damn great, why is Obama in office now? What did Reagan actually do to conserve anything?

Sure, Reagan didn’t start a crusade to spread gay rights and socialism via a land war in Asia, but at that point you’ve already lost the debate.

However, Reagan did manage to convince conservatives (aka the base) that the best way to lift all boats was to cut taxes on the rich and spend trillions on the military!

One caveat I had was that while Reagan, as the author claims, basically avoided large scale, long term American troop commitiments, and did his fighitng by either by proxy (Contras, mujahadin (sp), UNITA) or with small, but overwhelming, US forces against defenseless “enemies” (Greneda), he, by so doing, set the stage for the larger commitments under Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and now Obama. Reagan helped destroy the salutory legacy and lesson of Vietnam. True, the country was not going to forget and unlearn all at once, but his “little” wars and general bellicosity undermined the post Vietnam consensus of sceptisism towards the military, towards military solutions, towards Cold War rhetoric, and towards cheap, flag waiving, patriotism as an element in domestic politics. The author actually commends Reagan for the last part, the theatrical patriotism. But, I think, symbols and big talk and such like do matter in the long run. We have come from an era (the Seventies) when the Pentagon was widely and correctly recognized as being full of it, wasteful, aggressive, self interested, and so on to our own era, in which anything even remotely connected to the military is treated with slavish reverence. And, by “winning” the small wars (Grenada) and the proxy wars (Nicaragua, Afghanistan), Reagan paved the way for the larger wars, which are now proving, like Vietnam, to be quite unwinnable.

And, of course, none of the above even gets into the ethics or morality of a US military worshipped at home as it kills, mutilates and destroys overseas, but merely looks at it from the point of view of effectiveness. And that is part of Reagan’s legacy too.

President Reagan was closer to a “dove” than many would believe. During his tenure, there were no long-term “occupations”, longer than one year. After concluding the Grenada conflict, the US military gave control over to the Jamaican Army and its allies. Reagan had sense enough to abstain from “nation-building”, unlike later administrations.